Weird Al gets a hand from Kansas City's Project Blackbird

When Kansas City-based Project Blackbird received an email from Weird Al Yankovic's manager, co-owner and Creative Director Cameron Pierron thought it was spam.

"It just said, 'I'm Weird Al's manager. I'd like to talk to you about a project. Can we do a call?'" Pierron said of the email.

When Pierron called Weird Al's manager, Jay Levee, the next day, he realized this was real. Levee had stumbled upon Project Blackbird's website, which automatically plays a demo reel, and thought the post-production studio could be the right fit for creating four propaganda-style teasers to promote Weird Al's latest album, "Mandatory Fun."

Typically, record labels like RCA Records work with approved vendors to produce teasers and promotions, but after seeing Project Blackbird's five-second test video for the project, the label hired Project Blackbird for the job.

"I thought it was super cool," Pierron said. "I've always wanted to work in the music industry in some regard with graphics."

Working on a national project isn't a novel concept for Project Blackbird, which has produced spots for a number of clients on the coasts, including MTV and the Discovery Channel.

For Weird Al's project, Pierron and co-founder Chris Bird began scouring the Internet for propaganda films from the 1920s to 1950s, studying the style and imagery. Their research inspired the graphics they created and they also purchased archival footage to incorporate into the 15-second teasers.

"When we started, the only thing the record label would show us is this picture of Weird Al from the cover artwork," he said.

Weird Al donned a military uniform, and his stance looked like a dictator, he said. The style didn't speak American, so they incorporated Russian and North Korean styles into the clips.

"It's amazing how much you can put in 15 seconds, and people outside this industry don't realize that sometimes," he said. "How are we going to fill 15 seconds? That's how we look at it. Oh, my gosh, it's a lot of stuff to put in there."

Project Blackbird worked on a tight deadline to produce the teasers leading up to the July 15 album release and produced one teaser per week, with the first teaser being produced just five days after they were hired. For the first two teasers, Bird and Pierron worked one-on-one via telephone with Weird Al himself. One by one, RCA Records released the teasers, which received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. The teasers also created buzz on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. For the first time, a Weird Al album landed at No. 1 on the Billboard Charts.

"The week leading up to his album release, his social media presence increased by 3,900 percent. It skyrocketed," Pierron said. "Weird Al and his team were ecstatic with what we did, and I'm hoping it's going to lead to more work with RCA. We're getting some publicity for it, which is great."